Face Your Fear

Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave. replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982).

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully. Frances Moore Lappé

Fear is a basic emotional sensation and response system (“feeling”) initiated by an aversion to some perceived risk or threat.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. William James

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. H. P. Lovecraft

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. Bertrand Russell

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Bertrand Russell

Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiousity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear – an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We’re afraid of the body under the sheet. It’s our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths. Stephen King, Night Shift, foreward (1978).

Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Yoda in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798; 1817)